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Website SEO has changed and evolved a great deal over the last decade or so, however, many of the central tenets have remained similar if not the same, and it’s good to keep track of developments to ensure that your site is optimised as well as it can be. For this reason we wanted to go over some of the most important and proven SEO techniques to serve as a checklist for you and your website. If you’re not doing anything on the list already, then we recommend you focus on it right away.Blog PostingOne great way of improving your search engine ranking is by adding a blog to your site. Your blog is the perfect place to add additional info, to address your niche readership, and to increase the activity of your website as far as the search engine is concerned.Simple DesignGone are the days where a website was novel. Today the internet is a necessity, and billions of us all around the globe are connected to the internet from the start of each morning to the end of each night. As such, what was exciting and groundbreaking in the late nineties is probably old and tired by now, and this includes designing overly flashy website pages. Think of your website design as the decorum of your business. Too much colour and particularly bright colours can look tacky, and they can also detract from your actual content. The best approach we can advise when it comes to website design is to keep things clean, simple, and subtle. No website, whatever the subject, is going to look bad using a black and white colour format, and if you do want to make use of colours, try soft, calming, tonal colour palettes. This keeps your site looking classy and classic, and it also helps to focus the viewer’s eye on what’s most important, your content. Responsive DesignResponsive website design, as opposed to “m.sites” or mobile sub-domains, have become the clear go-to method of designing for mobile devices. What makes responsive design so superior to the alternatives is that it keeps all of your content together in one place, and allows that one website to respond to serve any device, be it your home PC, laptop, tablet, or mobile seamlessly and without delay. Further, all of the limitations found with the other options are irrelevant making responsive design the all round clear choice. Keeping Keyword Research SubtleKeyword research has been one of the leading methods of search engine optimisation since the dawn of the internet, and in many respects this remains unchanged. What has changed though is the search engine’s ability to find inauthentic keyword use. Once upon a time, a website could amass views by simply cramming popular keywords into a given piece of text, and this practice has become known as keyword stuffing. Today the search engine uses far more complex algorithms to assess content, and will punish the overuse of keywords, so keep things subtle and relevant.

The criteria for good website SEO is in many ways the same for improving how both the search engine and how your audience register your website. What this amounts to in the end is that proper SEO investment should effectively kill the two birds with one stone, providing a better user experience for your customer on one hand, and having a site which ranks well with search engines like Google on the other. This isn’t a coincidence, though, the search engine is programmed to seek out what the user is seeking, and they’re getting increasingly good at it.

So what is the criteria you ask? Well, here a some of the most important places to start.

Website performance

Website performance encompasses a few key factors, the most important perhaps is how fast your website runs. Speed is important in the digital age, and if a client gets impatient trying to load your webpage then the chances are that they’ve already opened a new tab and searched elsewhere.

In relation to the search engine, you can be quantitatively tested and if your site is slow and bugs often then your page rank will suffer. There are a number of ways to speed up your site, this includes proper site construction and keeping images and videos to a minimal (particularly relevant for mobile users).

You should also consider how any media loads, and ensure that you don’t have any dead pages or links which do not correspond to any pages.

ContentYour content is essentially the entire purpose of the website itself. When it comes to pleasing your customer you should consider how well your content reads, the keywords you use, and, critically, how your content compares with your competition.

When it comes to pleasing the search engine, on the other hand, you can make big gains by making a few simple changes. Ask yourself of each page of your site, what is the topic, theme, or subject of this page. Does the content address the subject directly? Are the keywords as relevant as possible? How well does the page URL reflect the topic and content? Finally, have you written relevant and clear meta descriptions and page titles for the search engine? These are very simple actions which can each have a profound effect on your website’s performance. Although they might also assist or reassure your visitors, these things are more for helping the search engine understand your website, and the better it does, the more likely it will rank you more highly.

NavigationHow easy is it to go from page to page of your website? Ideally, your site will be structured into sections, subsections, categories, and subcategories. Also, does your structure follow a logical plan? This is essential for creating a pleasant browsing experience for your user, and Google bots and crawlers will pick up on them too. Make sure that your site has as few dead ends as possible, and use icons that can return the user to the previous page and homepage wherever possible.

It’s often taken for granted that while the internet is a forum for businesses that cross all industries, as well as charities, news stations, and other sites which simply offer information on their given subject, not many of these will have much, if any, previous knowledge of what organic SEO is, and certainly not how to implement it. For all of you out there who this might apply to, it can be really very helpful to begin by making a checklist that you work your way through. There are a number of benefits to this, but mainly i think by keeping each element separate, it’s easier to keep track of progress, and in time to have a better understanding of how they interact. DesignThe design of your website is the first impression any of your customers will make of your business, and if it isn’t right, it may be their last. Fear not, though, an SEO expert is well versed in putting together simple yet attractive design. Responsive DesignThis relates to mobile website design. Responsive effectively means that your website design will be able to respond to different device types to format your content in the most eye pleasing way possible. By now, with over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, this isn’t something you want to miss out on. Keyword ResearchA keyword is a term used to describe certain keywords or phrases that you use in the content on your website to direct your content to the search engine, and your customer base. By ensuring that you’re using best terminology you can pick up more traffic, and feature higher on the search engine. By experimenting with new and different synonyms of keywords you might be able to make your content more competitive, and stay a step ahead of your competition. Building BacklinksWhen you have a link in your content which directs a user to another website, this is a backlink. Building backlinks is a key and fundamental method of SEO that has been in use since the beginning of SEO and the internet. There are two main reasons that backlinks are useful, firstly they connect your site to a wider web of context, making it easier for a search engine to understand what your site or page is about. Secondly, by building backlink partnerships over time, you should begin to see sites linking back to your content from theirs. Blog PostingThe final thing worth mentioning in this post as a way to grow your organic SEO is to post in a blog on your website. There are plenty of purposes that you could put a blog to use for, ideally, you’ll use it to post things which aren’t quite necessary to the majority of your audience, but which will no less be appreciated by at least some or many of them. One advantage of using a blog is that customers of your competition who are not offered the niche advice or information will eventually go looking for someone who does offer it, and this may well introduce them to your business.